Gamecraft March Game Jam 2023

Last weekend, I participated in the Gamecraft March 2023 - "Redo" jam. It had the theme of redo, and for it, we made Timeline Miami, an action twin-stick shooter with time-traveling puzzle game elements that is a cross between Hotline Miami, and 5D Chess with Time Travel and the Multiverse.

I think this jam went really well, especially considering this is the first time any of us developers had used the Godot engine. The game, while buggy and unbeatable at the time of submission, had a solid game feel, art style, and core mechanics that created interesting puzzles even with poor level design.

Due to our tiny team size, communication was a non-issue which allowed us to efficiently distribute tasks and communicate game design, which has been a big problem in the past. Additionally, the scope of the project was spot on as the combat mechanics were trivial to implement, and the time travel mechanic was easy enough to implement. Time travel was also made much easier to implement due to Godot's built-in tree structure and softly typed dictionaries (however, the fact that Godot benefited us was more due to luck rather than planning).

As for shortcomings, the game was utterly unplaytested as of its submission, and because of this, the level was actually unbeatable. Additionally, the game possessed no tutorial of any kind despite its somewhat unintuitive mechanics. There were also a host of bugs that we didn't have the time to fix. Ideally, in the future, having an additional member of the team dedicated to level design, playtesting, and QA would be incredibly helpful.

Overall I think the game design and game feel of this game are one of the best of any game I've worked on so far, and we plan on developing this game over the course of the next month into a minimum viable product.